KYIV, Ukraine — As western convictions about Ukraine begin to wobble, Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to toy with his biggest Slavic neighbour.

Putin has been playing one of the oldest games in international brinkmanship: He created dangerous problems in Ukraine and then generously offered to play peacemaker.

That is what Putin did again on the weekend when he promised to tighten control over Russia’s border with Ukraine so that “volunteers” and weapons that have been crossing the frontier in large numbers to join the separatist uprising against Kyiv would be prevented from doing so. This begs the question: How is it that so many of these men and their weapons been able to easily leave Russia until now when, if nothing else, Moscow is famous for keeping a stranglehold on its border areas and of having extremely thorough exit procedures?

And why is Putin promising to stop a practice that the Foreign Ministry in Moscow was reported by the Financial Times to have vehemently denied ever existed, saying that such accusations were “the work of the devil.”

Putin denied Russian troops took an active part in the annexation of Crimea, only to later admit that in fact they had. He now claims that Russian forces have nothing to do with what is going in eastern Ukraine.

A pro-Russian armed separatist militant stands guard at a barricade in Mariupol, on June 9, 2014. (DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images)

It is true that Russia’s hand has not been so obvious in eastern Ukraine as it was in Crimea, where several Russian soldiers told me without much prodding that they had been flown in for the operation. But the latest self-styled prime minister of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk, Alexander Borodai, is a Muscovite whom I saw on a street in Crimea two months ago when he was advising the self-proclaimed government there before Russia formally annexed the peninsula.

Those giving orders to the ragtag Moscow-friendly militias who are causing so much grief in cities such as Luhansk and Slavyansk have been very open that they are “volunteers” who have come from Russia to help out. It is probably no coincidence that their numbers have grown greatly in recent weeks after Putin finally began to make good on a promise he made — three times — to withdraw the tens of thousands of troops he had dispatched to the border areas.

Another tidbit is that the French are reported to have said that Putin privately admitted to them at last week’s D-Day anniversary celebrations in Normandy that Russia had influence over the separatists in eastern Ukraine.

So, stop the charade in the West that there is no firm proof that Russia is involved in eastern Ukraine. Of course it is, up to its eyeballs.

Elderly people sit in front a barricade set outside the city hall seized by pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. (VIKTOR DRACHEV/AFP/Getty Images)

Lost in all this noise is that the original question that triggered the cataclysms in Ukraine was whether the country should look to the East or look to the West. Ukraine’s elected leader, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted from the presidency in a bloody street coup in Kyiv for reneging on a deal with the European Union and making a separate, last-minute deal with Russia. Russia lopped off Crimea and menaces Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, where there is much animosity toward Kyiv but considerable ambivalence about closer ties with the Russia, let alone a formal union.

Ukraine’s newly-elected president, Petro Poroshenko, made clear when he was sworn in on Saturday that after everything Russia has done to Ukraine he still regards Crimea as Ukrainian and sees his country’s future with the West.

Unfortunately for Poroshenko, several western leaders (France’s Francois Hollande, Britain’s David Cameron and Germany’s Angela Merkel) were willing to ignore the greatest territorial grab in Europe since the Second World War and hobnobbed with Putin at the Normandy commemorations, demonstrating that it is most unlikely that Western Europe has Ukraine’s back. As noted by Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Institute, “these multiple rendezvous in France, which have spectacularly broken the Western leaders’ self-imposed ban on face-to-face meetings with Vladimir Putin, have not bridged the widening divide between the Western world and Russia.”

Pro-Russian militants guard a barricade on which a placard reads “Those who execute orders of the junta are fascists” at a check-point in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk. (VIKTOR DRACHEV/AFP/Getty Images)

There is a window right now for diplomacy. Poroshenko and Putin spoke in France a few days ago, too, even if they seemed to mostly be speaking past each other. Moscow has returned its ambassador to Kyiv after an absence of three months. Delicate talks about how to go forward began over the weekend.

However, Poroshenko has now categorically stated that for him the West is best. Russia continues to demand that Ukraine stop attacking the militias occupying parts of the east, pull back from the EU and grant sweeping powers to Russians living in eastern Ukraine.

It now gets little attention in the western media, but about a dozen towns and cities in eastern Ukraine are already on fire. What happens next might be uglier than anything that has happened so far.

Matthew Fisher is Postmedia's international affairs columnist and Canada's longest serving foreign correspondent. He has lived and worked abroad for 31 years in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and... read more, more recently, Afghanistan. His assignments have taken him to 162 countries, all U.S. states, Canadian provinces and territories, above the North Pole and to an iceberg over the Magnetic North Pole. During his travels he has been an eyewitness to 19 wars and conflicts. The personal highlight of his career as a roaming correspondent was when he attended Nelson Mandela's inauguration in Pretoria.View author's profile